The Reluctant Prince

Chapter 28

When
Jet got back to the compound, Macek was already there talking to his
prisoners. Queen Sephira invited Jet to
take a late lunch with her, after exchanging a quick look with her husband, but
Jet declined. He wasn’t hungry anyway,
if she was really just offering lunch.
He’d caught the look that the King and Queen had shared.

Macek
had all sorts of papers spread out over the low table and on the floor. Ricky sat with his knees drawn up to his
chest, as Macek talked animatedly about whatever was on those papers. Jet’s arrival scattered them all over the
room. “Watch it,” Macek said gruffly,
not even bothering to look up. He jabbed
his finger onto one of the loose sheets of paper. “This marks the blasted area near the Eastern
Sea. See these irregular spots? They’re caves. I think they could be entrances to
subterranean tunnels. Are they?” He pinned Reg with an intense stare.

Jet
leaned over for a closer look. “What’s
that?” He pointed to a thin line which
wove haphazardly around the edges of the paper, skirting the large empty space
in the middle. “A road?”

“Very
good,” Macek said sourly. “You can read
a map.”

“Never
heard of it,” Reg said off-handedly.

Macek
snorted. “Right. And you’re from Ballind, too.”

“Near
there,” Reg corrected softly, staring Macek in the eye.

“We will find your other bases. You could save yourself a lot of trouble if
you just tell us now. Are the Sons of Men based in the blasted
lands?”

“Now
that would be impossible,” drawled Reg with a slow grin. “Nothing human could live out there. Your King made sure of that.”

Jet
glanced at Macek in surprise. His father
had been responsible for the blasted lands?
But why?

As
if Macek had heard his thoughts, Macek answered, “That is where the Sons of Men
had their headquarters before. It stands
to reason you’d try to regroup there again.”

“Except
that the blasted lands are uninhabitable,” Ricky pointed out.

Macek
let it go as they were just going round in circles. “You’d better hope the Enforcer found something,”
he said as a parting shot. “Your days
are numbered as it is.” He pulled Jet
aside. “I need to talk to you. About what you did.”

“You
mean this?” Jet let himself become fire.

Macek
blanched, his eyes darting to their two prisoners, who watched the show with
wary interest. “They know?”

Jet
took back his human essence and answered.
“I saw no reason to hide it. I’m
done hiding. Merrell tells me not to
tell the King. The King tells me not to
tell Merrell. What am I supposed to think?”

“You’re
a pawn.” Reg spoke quietly from his cot,
earning an angry glance from Macek.
“They want to use you to further their own ends. But you’re not so easily used, are you, Jet?”

Jet
smiled at the use of his nickname and shook his head. He didn’t want to be used, but it might
already be too late. Merrell had given
him a place to belong. King Roy had
given him an identity. Now that he knew,
how could he walk away from it all?

Macek
scowled. “That’s not what I meant,” he
said, pulling Jet further into the shadows.
He gestured, creating a solid wall out of shadow to screen them from the
other two. It didn’t block sound,
however, although Macek lowered his voice.
“Mattie,” he began. “He can do
that to his hands. He doesn’t just call
flame to them, his hands are flame,
Jet. What did you do to him?”

Jet
raised his eyebrows. “He can? Well, that’s interesting.” He vanished Macek’s shadow wall since Reg and
Ricky had heard every word anyway. “What
about you? Can you do it too?”

“Of
course not!” Macek said hotly. “It
should be impossible. I don’t understand
how Mattie can do it. The other boys are
envious. They want to be able to turn
into flame, too.”

“But
so far it’s just Mattie?” Jet had an
idea on why it might be so. Mattie had
only just come into his elemental powers.
He had entered Arden at the same time as Jet. At six years old, he was powerful as only a
royal child could be, yet he hadn’t yet developed the preconceptions that the
other royals all exhibited. He didn’t know
he couldn’t turn into flame,
basically. Once he saw Jet do it, he
just copied him.

Jet
sat down heavily next to Ricky, who startled but didn’t back away. An improvement. It had just occurred to Jet that he had been
right around Mattie’s age, maybe a year or so younger, when he had run away
into the subway. He hadn’t known he had
elemental abilities, really. Oh, he had
made water dance and fashioned toys out of shadow, but he had thought all kids
could do that. It was natural. Shortly after he had entered the subway, he
found himself alone and scared. He just
used what came naturally to protect himself.
With sudden clarity, he recalled fingers of wind reaching for him
through the bars of an inescapable tunnel, and
he had reached back, becoming wind so that he could cross through to the
other side. Was that all there was to
it?

“What
is it?” Macek asked, when Jet remained silent for too long.

Jet
laughed, mostly at himself. “I’ve been
looking at this all wrong,” he said. He
had not inherited his unusual abilities from either his mother or his
father. In fact, his abilities might not
be as unusual as everyone thought.

Reg
and Ricky followed the conversation avidly.
It seemed their Family captors had momentarily forgotten them. But Jet did not elaborate. Instead, he stood up to leave. He wanted to take another look at the book
King Roy had let him take from the secret library.

Macek
snapped his fingers and all his papers obediently lined up and formed
themselves into a neat pile, which he then picked up. Neat trick, Jet thought. He’d have to remember that one.

Jet
caught a slight motion at the end of the hallway. His lips curved upwards in amusement. Well, well.
As they left the prisoners, a darker shadow detached itself from the
wall. Jet pretended not to notice. Daniel followed at a distance, his face
puckered in concentration as he sifted through what he’d seen and heard. He slid into the dining room ahead of the two
cousins and busied himself at the sideboard.
Since the incident with the fliers, Daniel had not gone back to Arden
and had no immediate plans to do so.
Grinning widely, he asked, “Did you make any progress?”

Macek
ignored Daniel and Jet just shrugged.
Queen Sephira swept into the room and headed straight for Daniel until
she noticed Jet and Macek. She changed
her course and linked arms with Jet.
“Come have dinner with me,” she purred.
“You must be hungry since you forewent lunch.”

Daniel’s
eyes hardened, but he turned away and continued piling food onto his
plate. Jet shook his head. “I have other plans,” he told the Queen.

Queen
Sephira stiffly withdrew her hand from Jet’s arm. “Do your ‘other plans’ involve that common
Family girl, Doll?” She walked to the
other end of the dining table and whirled to face him. “Then you might as well stay and eat, because
she won’t be joining us.” She made a
point of looking at the clock on the wall.
“By now I trust she’s half-way back to Low City. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Jet. It wasn’t my
doing.” But the Queen smiled with
satisfaction. “It seems she was expelled from her school and sent home for
breaking the rules. Won’t her parents be
proud?”

“And
how would you know?” Jet asked softly, much too softly. But Queen Sephira didn’t take the hint, not
even when the lights in the dining room flickered. Jet clenched his fists, tempted to
discorporate right then and there to follow after Doll. He stared at the Queen, waiting for an
answer.

“Thomas
told me,” she said with a quick little smile.

The
lights in the dining room went out and stayed out.

“Jet.” Macek’s voice penetrated the heavy dark. “Wait.”

But
there was no answer.

“What
did you expect?” Daniel’s voice. “Sephira, forget about him. He’s got his head screwed on backwards. Here.”
Daniel cupped a small globe of light in his hands which grew steadily
brighter as he pulled what little light there was from the hallway into the
darkened room. He guided Sephira to her
seat as Macek also conjured a globe of light.
Jet stood just where he had been, his dark eyes black with fury. When Daniel spotted him, he flinched.

Jet
pivoted on his heel and walked out of the dining room, becoming wind as he
rounded the corner. Maybe Doll hadn’t
left yet; maybe he could catch her, stop her.
If his Family didn’t accept Doll, then he had no desire to stay with
them. All these thoughts flew through
his mind in an instant, much less time than it took him to reach Doll’s
apartment, even as wind. He oozed inside
and solidified, but Doll was not there.
Her things were gone, except for a few books she’d left piled on her
small desk. Jet rifled through them
quickly, unsurprised to see that they were all books on the history of the
Family. In the bottom one he found a
torn piece of paper addressed to him:

Jet, I’m sorry I let you down. You were right; I should have stayed with you
today. But we both know what
happened. I’m worried for my own
family. If your uncle could do this to
me so easily, what will he do to my parents?
Please don’t follow me. I’ll be
all right as long as I do what they want.
After I make sure my parents are unharmed, I’ll write to you. We’ll
be together again, Jet, I know it. Right
now those two non-family boys have no one else as their advocate but you. Do what you can for them. Don’t worry about me. I love you.
Doll

Jet
crumpled up the paper, thought better of it, and let it turn to ash on his
palm. How could she ask him to forget
her? Doll was sweet, and Jet had always
felt an attraction towards her which he knew was reciprocated. But since he’d come to Arden, Doll had become
more than that to him. She was
stability, she was home. He didn’t want to
imagine being without her. And they had
never even had sex! Laughing bitterly to
himself, Jet gathered up the books she had left him. Doll was right. She usually was when she wasn’t being overly
cautious.

Fine. Jet would give Doll time to make sure her
parents were okay. But then he was
coming after her, and when he caught up to her again, they were having sex—and
then they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. She was right about Reg and Ricky,
though. Jet couldn’t just leave them
here to die at the end of five days, of which he only had three left. Merrell would be expecting him to try something
on the fifth day. Therefore, Jet needed
to act sooner than that.

He
needed to check the book in his bedroom at Arden first.

Depositing
Doll’s books on his bed, he waved his hand to reveal his own bookshelf and took
down the one King Roy had shown him. His
stomach growled; he had missed supper in Darcy and at Arden. Rolling over, he reached for his abandoned
clothes from the last few days which were piled up on the floor next to his
bed. He dug through pockets until he had
a handful of small treats—rolls, candies, fruit, and even a smashed, but still
tasty, piece of cake. He stuffed the
cake into his mouth, licking crumbs off the wrapper, and put some of the other
food into the pockets of the pants he was currently wearing for later. Then he spent the next several hours reading
about the origins of the Family.

Doll’s
school books were less informative than the one from the secret library, but
even that information was informative in a different manner. Her books never mentioned that Family were
anything other than corporate, mortal beings, although they did hint that
Family and non-family were inherently different, so much so that cross-breeding
was impossible. The other book stopped
at the point where Family had become mortal.
It read like fantasy, and at times Jet wondered if perhaps that was
exactly what it was: a storybook written
for Family enjoyment. But too many
pieces too closely mirrored his own abilities.

What
was missing between the two sources was how Family had become the way they were
now. If Jet was to believe Family
originated as pure elements and somehow obtained the ability to put on human
form, how did they get to the point where they were born and died? Because Jet was most certainly born, not
formed, and so was every other Family who lived today. What had happened in between?

Jet
left Doll’s books on his bed and took the one King Roy had given him over to
Macek’s quarters. Tommy met him at the
door as if he were a long-lost friend.
Macek, as usual, was sitting behind his small desk in the sitting area,
working on yet another set of papers.
Jet tossed him the book. “Here,
you said you wanted to borrow this.”

“Jet,
Jet!” Tommy pulled on his sleeve. “I want to do what Mattie can do! Will you show me again?”

Macek,
already perusing the book, rolled his eyes.
But he took some of his attention away from the book in favor of
watching Jet’s reaction.

Jet
took a hard candy out of his pocket and laid it on the table. He surrounded it with a cage of shadow, cages
being on his mind lately. The spaces
between the bars were too small for Tommy to fit his hands through. “Get the candy,” he told the boy.

Tommy
tried in the usual way. “I can’t,” he
said after a few minutes.

Jet
grinned. “You have to really want
it. Keep trying.”

They
had attracted an audience. Charlie, back
from the compound, Mattie, and even Lorra crowded around the shadow cage with
its sweet treat inside. Macek abandoned
the book and came forward to block the box from Lorra’s view, frowning at Jet
as he did so. Lorra was not one of the
few who was privy to Jet’s secret. Jet
smiled blandly back, not caring if she saw or not.

“I
can do it!” Mattie reached fiery hands
through the bars and touched the candy, melting it slightly. He triumphantly held it up in his now-solid
hands.

Laughing,
Jet took back the candy and replaced it inside the shadow cage. “Let the others give it a try.” So far, he had only showed them fire. How long would it take them, and Mattie in
particular, to figure out they could do it with the other elements also?

Lorra
kept craning her head to see past Macek.
“What is he doing?” She pushed past Macek and stalked over to the
shadow box. “I don’t see what’s so hard
about this.” Macek gave Jet a desperate
look. She plunged her hand towards the
candy in the center of the shadow box and the shadows disintegrated at her
touch. “See?” She held up the piece of candy. Jet winked at the boys, and set the box back
to inpenetrable. Lorra left shortly
after, feeling superior because her ability with shadow was that much more
advanced than the beginner’s were. The
boys continued to try to change their hands into fire in order to pass through
the bars. That should keep them occupied
for a while.

“I’m
sorry about Doll,” Macek murmured. “But
you know—“

Jet
cut him off. “If you’re going to tell me
it’s for the best, don’t. Has Merrell
come back yet?”

“No. He followed the lead the prisoners gave us,
even though he didn’t believe they were telling the truth. There are other towns out that way, towns
that are not Family towns. His enforcers
swept through those towns and arrested about twenty suspected
troublemakers. If he doesn’t find any
real information when he’s through interrogating them, he will be back for the
prisoners. We need to get some solid
information from them before then.”

Jet
thought so too, just not in the same way Macek was thinking. Merrell would be back in a few days. That didn’t give him much time. He left Macek’s rooms, avoiding Lorra where
she lurked in the common area hoping to run into him, and returned to his own
rooms. He didn’t stay there long, becoming wind for
ease of motion as he traveled down the mountain towards Darcy one last time.

Appearing
inside the darkened prison cell, Jet called up a small globe of light. “Wake up,” he whispered, shaking first one
cot and then the other. “We’re leaving.”

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